Belly of the Beast review – harrowing moments in a trainee’s tale of school trauma
The central, bifurcated character of Martha goes to a school where aggression routinely erupts outside its gates, on the bus home, even in the classroom between teachers and pupils. Playwright Saana Sze’s first full-length play is not so much a reckoning with this violence or the pupil-teacher dynamic as a journey through it: a kind of testimony of survival.
Two figures at either end of a traverse stage speak in monologue about their respective lives: one is a teenager drawn to a volatile girl in an east London classroom. The other is a trainee teacher who was let down by the school system herself but has hopes to improve it now. Both are Black, queer, non-binary.
They talk past each other and it takes a little while to realise they are versions of the same person, in different time frames – or as it is in written in the programme YoungMartha (Sam Bampoe-Parry) and NowMartha (Shiloh Coke).
It is a strength of the play that it conjures two worlds within the world of the school – that of the staff room and the vulnerability of a new teacher, and all that goes on in the mind of a teenager who is deemed problematic. But this is its weakness too; YoungMartha’s world is much more compelling, while NowMartha’s monologues come to feel grounded, with forced breakaways on theories of what school is for. Their story around gender identity does not seem dramatic or complete enough either.
Under the direction of Dadiow Lin, the actors have little to do in terms of movement. They circle the room and NowMartha puts on different clothes in symbolic gestures about their non-binary identity, it seems, which is increasingly stifled at school.
They take on multiple parts within their discrete worlds too, and it is difficult to keep a hold of the changing scenarios. The lack of connection between the two incarnations of Martha comes to feel unsatisfying. The most intense moments come with the harrowing incidents in YoungMartha’s life (Bampoe-Parry makes her stage debut here with conviction). They describe everything from the bigotry and micro-aggressions of teachers who mispronounce the names of pupils or display flagrant Islamophobia, to teen anger and adult abuse outside the school. This is what grips you, and for all the cleverness of Martha’s two parallel worlds, the focus might have been greater for exploring one.
